This stage becomes critical, especially in a case where there was some resistance to the women’s seropositive status from a member or members of the family, whose resistance would perhaps
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interfere with the overall treatment intake. Thato, Queen, Maliketso, and Portia are examples of the women who worked hard to mend the relationship with their partners and their children from the time they discovered they were HIV seropositive up until the time when they eventually joined the support group.
Queen had to make a choice between staying in a marriage where her health and life were threatened and quitting to be able to regain her normal health. Below is her assertion about her partner’s reaction:
….we never discuss HIV issues in the house because our relations were not good….No! He never agreed to use a condom, he would come home drunk and would force me to sleep with him. This action hurt me a lot because what he was doing would cause a reinfection in me….I decided to leave the marriage because he used to assault me (Queen).
Prioritising health over marriage, is a bold step and an act of picking up the pieces towards wholeness. If it had not been for her decision to go to the extremes of quitting the marriage that exposed her to risky practices, Queen would not have gathered strength to deal with her HIV condition effectively, given that she discovered she was HIV positive when she was pregnant – a critical stage where she had to ensure her own and her unborn baby’s survival through compliance with prevention of HIV from mother-to-child (PMTCT) requirements. She explained it in this way:
When I first knew I was HIV positive that is when I was pregnant. I was very hurt, because at that time it was common to associate HIV with adultery and knowing that I never had any extra-marital relationship, made me very angry (Queen).
Thato had a mean partner who did not entertain any discussion on HIV and AIDS at the house.
He never liked to use a condom (Thato’s statement in Chapter Five bears reference). Some of the utterances between Thato and her partner included:
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….I told him that according to my status, it is not safe to have unprotected sex….tension erupted again in the house. He threatened to marry another wife. He started to have suspicious movements leaving the home early, coming back late at night. He did this for two weeks (Thato).
Apparently for Thato that did not mark the final step in her efforts to mend the relationship. Her partner still demonstrated a lot of dislike for her attendance of information or knowledge-seeking forums. This is what she further said:
…I remember there was recently an HIV event in the community, I participated. I was resource person to teach about PMTCT and HIV education. My husband commented on the event and said that all speakers were good except myself, that I was actually boring…
I told him that I was not boring, it is just that what I was talking about you did not like, but please note that whether you do like to talk about HIV or not, you will have problems accessing treatment…(Thato).
Thato talks vehemently to her partner to make him understand the importance of knowing about HIV and AIDS. The result of this conversation, over time, brings about change in Thato’s relations with her partner. She said the following on the matter:
…When he came home after a long time, he was happy. I could not believe my eyes, he was the same husband I knew, a changed person, and that is how my family relations changed. I think it is because since I was diagnosed with HIV, I was taught to control my temper, I started to practice it, I speak with him softly and [it is] less noisy in the house (Thato).
Thato might have ended the relationship given her husband’s initial reaction, but her persistence and ability to change her own interactions with her husband and rebuild the relationship, show her commitment to “picking up the pieces” and saving the marriage...
Mending relations with children
The participants’ relations with their children were also crucial in their attempts to pick up the pieces. On the issue of mending the relationship with her family, Thato intended to correct the lies that she had told her children about the medication she was continuously taking. She explained that:
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When I started taking ARVs, I lied to them (children) that I was taking ulcer medication. ….I told them that the medication I am taking is for HIV. I reminded them of my continuous ill health. I then assured them that I was now going to live longer and healthier. I then told them that I do not have AIDS but HIV (Thato).
This explains perhaps why Thato, despite her one-year period of hiding her HIV status and treatment intake from her children, had to adopt ways of mending her family relationships in order to freely sustain her treatment in-take. This is another signal of strength that Thato demonstrated as a way of picking up her pieces and moving on with her lifetime of treatment for a life threatening condition.
Maliketso, Portia and Libuseng1, too, experienced a lot of difficulty building their children’s confidence and acceptance of their mothers’ HIV condition. While each of the women fought their battles from different angles, all of them displayed a lot of strength to make things right with their children. For example, the fear and denial around HIV and AIDS that is demonstrated by Maliketso’s children, clearly prompted her to regain strength to convince them that she would no longer become as sickly as she was prior to testing for HIV. The quest of the children to go to check about their health status, suggests their growing fear that they might have been infected too. She said that:
My children usually ask when they can go to check for HIV and to check for TB (Maliketso).
This statement posed a challenge to Maliketso. She had to work hard to convince her children that she was the one with HIV and not them.
Libuseng1, too, has had to work hard to convince her children of the importance of public disclosure of her HIV positive status. Her children had, after a long time accepted her status but did not want her to disclose it publicly. The fact that Libuseng1 eventually joined the support
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group and openly declared her status indicate that it took a lot of strength to convince her children of the importance of public disclosure. She said that:
My children nowadays understand my status, they support me with medication. I am the one who told them, the elder one did not want to understand my situation, but the younger one was ever supportive. The elder one in fact did not want anything to do with my being HIV positive (Libuseng1).
This statement denotes that Libuseng1 had a tough time to make her children accept her HIV condition. The “nowadays” implies that in the past it was not an easy task breaking the HIV news to her children. However, she found strength in “picking up her pieces” by continuously talking about her HIV condition to her family until she finally won the battle.
Having heard insights regarding picking up the pieces from the family’s perspective, it now becomes necessary to look at this metaphor from a personal perspective- how the participants themselves reacted to a lifetime treatment – its intake, reaction/effects of treatment on each individual and how each one coped with the treatment.